I was interested in doing some blender blocks for this structure and at the same time study the way they have done it in Oblivion. As you may or may not know Oblivion dungeons are made of individual pieces like corners, small passages, 3 way passages, ect, that snap together perfectly.

The blocks in the game have some interesting and tricky solutions to make textures join seamless. The problem in the previous game Morrowind was that when we use this techinque we often need to rotate pieces before snaping and thats what creates the seams in models. The other problem is non-aligned normals at the snap borders but that is easy to fix.

Oblivion solved the problem by creating 4 different geometry variants one for each possible rotation. So a corner for example as four possible variations as there are four different ways to rotate a corner by 90 degress. I have gone even further and sectioned each piece into four sometimes eight parts.

There are sets in my Blender file without door holes and with door holes, a door a door frame mode that fits in these holes perfectly. If we want, for example, a corner that goes right then up with a door at the south wall we just combine the necessary parts, duplicating as necessary with ALT-D (dup by reference) and not rotation is necessary is a piece for every rotation possible.

Heres the partial Blender model for the concept art above. I also made it possible to navigate inside it using the Blender game engine but for that it's necessary a patched version of the game engine you can download here:

You should see a view from the current camera in full window. If not press CTRL-UP with the mouse on the 3d window then NUMPAD0 to view from the camera. Finnaly to initiate the simulation press P and use the arrow keys to navigate around.

The scene is very economic but unfortunatly not very efficient for a game engine. There are hundreds of objects with less than 16 faces each. Usualy game engine prefer objects with a bigger number of faces, say more than 10000 for modern cards, but not that big, say less than 50000, for example. Don't know if this estimate is acurate just something i heard somewhere.

One way to releave the burdon of having thousands of tiny objects is to build bigger pieces like entire interiors for one tower as a single object, but still maintain the smaller units to create new average sized pieces.

All the objects in the scene are dulicated by reference from a very small number of primitives meshes.

The flags at the end of the names meens: D = with door, H = horizontal orientation, V = vertical orientation, Q<number> = quadrant or section.

All the content in the Blender file is copyright free so you can use without problems in your games.

I would be interested to know if anyone will be interested in using these construction blocks in a game or a demo using one of the game engines talked in this site. If so please let us see some screenshots or play a demo of your game.

Ah yes. If you download the latest Blender 2.43 RC1 is the same. By the way theres a new option to bake Blenders procedural color and normal maps to an image with CTRL-ALT-B. I think it can also bake light data. Very useful for people like me with little art skills to create good textures.

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